The web is a creative industry and is facing the same decline and shattered economics as film, TV, or publishing
Accidentally wrote this while trying to figure things out, so I might as well publish it here. And, no, I didn’t bother to edit it, so expect fluff and rambling.
Everywhere I look, it’s becoming more and more clear that a lot of job markets are in very bad shape.
The web developer job market is in a sorry state. Software developers in general don’t seem to be doing well. Too many work for free on free or open source projects they believe in – some because they think it’ll pay off for their careers down the line, others because they just really believe in the project
The creative industries are, anecdotally, doing quite poorly. Illustrators, copywriters, voice-over artists, and translators are losing jobs to generative models. Video, TV, and cinema crews are doing badly with multiple stories going around about budgets for most projects dropping and many of them are literally working for free in the hope that it’ll somehow pay off later on or because they just really believe in the project. What distinguishes cities that are creative industry hubs – like New York, LA, or London – is that the free “I believe in this” work is subsidised by paid work elsewhere in the industry. A film-maker works for free on their indie film but shoots B-roll, music videos, and ads to pay the bills. A writer might work as a copywriter, journalist, or reporter. An illustrator does editorial and ad work to pay while working on their comic or children’s book for free. They all hope that this passion project is the one that’ll take off and pay for itself (and the next one) but, as long as there is related creative work available to pay for the practice and the gear, they’ll keep trying regardless.
The “day job” has been a fixture in the creative industries, because of how much of the work is done at pay that’s well below subsistence levels (“patient spouse” is another common form of subsidy), and this dynamic inevitably leads to burnout. There will come a point for many where you think to yourself, “none of this is working out” and you quit.
Ten-fifteen years ago I knew quite a few people who worked for UK trade publishers. Very few of them are still in the industry and those who do tend to have “adjacent” day jobs.
The creative industries have another thing in common with web dev (in fact, I’d personally categorise the web as a creative industry, but that’s a conversation for another day) and that’s the fact that its current state is largely down to poor management. US media shot itself in the foot with the switch to subscription streamers and seem unusually incapable of following through on what makes them money.
Like, Crazy Rich Asians made a ton of money in 2018. Old Hollywood would have churned out at least two sequels by now and it would have inspired at least a couple of imitator films. But if they ever do a sequel it’s now going to be at least seven or even eight years after the fact. That means that, in terms of the cultural zeitgeist, they are effectively starting from scratch and the movie is unlikely to succeed.
Every Predator movie after the first has underperformed, yet they keep making more of them. Completed movies are shelved for tax credits. Entire shows are disappeared streamers and not made available anywhere to save money on residuals, which does not make any sense because the economics of Blu-Ray are still quite good even with lower overall sales and distribution than DVD. If you have a completed series or movie, with existing 4K masters, then you’re unlikely to lose money on a Blu-Ray.
You see this dysfunction throughout the creative industry. Everywhere you look you see bad products – ones made for too much money without even the limited understanding of the audience these industries used to have, with no hope of ever returning a profit – dominate film, TV, and even publishing. These industries, as a whole, are genuinely fucked up. Even the paid jobs when they happen have much lower budgets and are employing fewer people.
This dysfunction means that the “adjacent but still in the industry” jobs that used to pay for the passion projects are fewer and farther between. More and more people have to rely on unrelated day jobs (or spouses) to stay in the industry and the cold hard truth is that most of them will burn out and leave eventually.
This matters because the passion projects are how creative industries rejuvenate themselves. It’s the field’s R&D. Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez kicked off a new wave of a new kind of cinema and their first movies were no-budget passion projects.
And the blatantly commercial work, the stuff that employs people in the industry because it’s profitable, matters because that’s how you train new talent. Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, and more all got their start in either B-movies or TV.
The web is quite similar. Much of the “actual” work in the industry is done in open source, often work that’s done for free or at pay that’s well under subsistence levels. Everybody hopes their passion project will break out and become self-sustaining, but in the meantime it worked to demonstrate their skills and get them similar work that’s paid – often very well paid. Much of the web industry feels a creative industry, but one that differentiates itself in that the commercial work for the “grunts” (that is, us) in the industry pays about 5x what TV, publishing, or movie commercial work would pay, because much of it is subsidised by deranged gamblers gaming the financial industry.
Similarly, the web apps themselves have increasingly become genuinely awful. Unusable, inaccessible, and thoroughly broken on most people’s devices. Costs that are out of control. Feature-driven development that’s completely detached from customer needs – and I’m not just talking about the flood of garbage “AI” features. Pricing that is only possible because of indiscriminate VC funding and doesn’t really have any hope of returning a genuine profit.
And now, both the creative industries proper and tech companies have decided that, no, they probably don’t need that many of the “grunts” on the ground doing the actual work. They can use “AI” at a much lower cost because the output of the “AI” is not that much worse than the incredibly shitty degraded products they’ve been destroying their industries with over the past decade or so.
This changes the dynamics of these industries and those of us who aren’t in the management and executive class are no longer benefiting from the overall bargain. Tactics that made sense are now irrational.
The creative industries need to rethink their approach to streamers and standard distribution, but web dev, the industry I’m a part of, is particularly in a need of rethinking everything.
- It doesn’t make sense for us to hand over our personal projects to the industry proper. Instead it makes sense to focus on the corners of the web industry that still offer a measure of autonomy and scale the rewards with success.
- Use the web to serve customers directly. Instead of making open source components that get co-opted and integrated into garbage services by tech companies, make software directly for the customers who aren’t being served by the industry’s usual garbage.
- Making stuff for end-users who are using it in their own work and businesses makes more sense.
- You don’t have to win a million users with your web app or service, but a thousand of us with a thousand users has the same impact and, if we’re performing a valuable service for them, probably more sustainable.
- Making expensive courses and products (as in, hundreds or thousands of dollars) to help people get high-paying jobs made sense when the job market was healthy, but it’s not likely to be a sustainable product strategy when pay is stagnant and the jobs are few.
- And lower-cost courses about making said stuff – web dev for small businesses that benefits end users in a cost-effective way – also makes sense.
- Don’t get tied to a single platform for distribution or promotion. Every use of a silo should push those interested to a venue you control such as a newsletter or website.
None of this is easy, but being unemployed – discarded by your industry – is harder.